


The Whens and Ways He Strayed

by StellarRequiem (orphan_account)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Blind Locus, Body Worship, Canon Compliant, E rating comes into play after chapter 1, Exhibitionism, I Don't Know Anymore, M/M, Voyeurism, ambiguously open relationship, and whatever the hell is going on in chapter 3, changes in relationship over time, exhibitionist Felix, implied unsafe autoerotic asphyxiation, merc-typical violence and aggression of both the physical and psychological variety, non-consenting third party in the most heavily voyeuristic chapter, open relationship that isn't renegotiated over time, reaaaallly brutal sex, trigger warning for Locus is an emotional catastrophe or something, unequal affection/love/whatever you want to call the trainwreck that is canon-compliant lolix, voyeur Locus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-01 19:43:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5218409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the first time he’d come home from someone else and still demanded you. And demand he did. As he pulled at your belt and tore it open, and as you worked his undershirt over his head, you wondered what that meant.</p><p>_______</p><p>Second person, directed at Locus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. At the Dead-end Beginning

“Where have you been?”

Felix sauntered into your inglorious base of operations with his jacket slung over his shoulder, a duffle bag in hand. He dropped the bag on the floor between himself at the threshold, and you at your lonely table of a weapons bench. The muffled clatter, sudden and too sharp after the close, comfortable quiet of his absence, told you his answer.

“Ammo,” he snapped. As if that wasn’t clear enough from the noise.

“And that took all night?”

“The haggling did.”

His sullen mouth fractured sideways beneath his tired eyes, broadening into a winning, closed-mouthed, and lopsided grin. There were both a sweetness and a sensuality in that smile. You distrusted it enormously.

He stood there, waiting, for you to study him. To see what he’d like you to see. You had to adjust your eyes to make him out past the slanted gray light of foggy morning pouring through the door behind him, recalibrate color. Squint, for all the good it did. That latter gesture was an instinct—a remnant of the natural sight you’d lost. The way the gesture pulled at your already furrowed brows broke Felix’s closed grin wide open across the bright evenness of his teeth. He’d capped the four he’d broken across the butt of a rifle—not yours, unfortunately—with his first paycheck, and you’d thought, with his every smile since, that the fix made him too pretty. More beautiful than he deserved to be. It was the kind of privileged, artificial beauty a face like his didn’t need, that masked how dangerous he really was. How quick and brutal and unforgiving. The blooming purple dental impressions above his collar suited him better, you thought, than his own teeth did.

Those were the marks he’d wanted you sto see. His gloating explanation. You returned your attention to the bench in front of you; to the pistol in your hands.

“Close the door,” you told him.

He somehow found a way to vocalize rolling his eyes: you knew what he was doing without having to look up.

 _You_ found a way to ignore him.

Doing so was easier after a night and afternoon of solitude. Of perfect calm. You’d spent hours the evening before checking over your armor simply because you could—piece by piece, seal by seal, snap by snap, plate by plate in careful, premeditated order with it spread out in even rows around you. With only your own movement and the groaning of the dock to interrupt the silence Felix’s absence left behind. That you’d fallen asleep with a gun beneath your hand, sideways on the mattress so that there was a wall to your back in place of the body heat you’d grown accustomed to, that you’d woken before the sun to anxiety that outlasted your nightmares, and that you’d decided to clean every gun the two of you possessed just to consume your mind while the hours ticked by were facts you elected not to dwell on. They raised too many uncertainties and cluttered the rhythm of the routine you were so painstakingly building in the wake of what you’d lost.

It had been eight months since you left the army.

Since it left you.

Abandoned you and the stolen armor that was all that you had left and was the only piece of you that mattered, to petty strongman work and backroom deals. To overpriced acquisitions Felix sometimes tempered—when it suited him—with teeth that weren’t yours on his body. You might have doubted his assertion that it had anything at all to do with discounts if not for the fact that other people’s money was the one thing that he loved. It was a an affair you could tolerate: he did, at least, have good taste in how he spent it. For all his talk of indulgence, he came home—and this plastic-smelling shipping container of a FOB had, whether he admitted it or not, become exactly that—with impressive upgrades, reliable materials, and necessary supplies. It was one of many small blessings that made tolerating him worthwhile as he dragged the door shut, grumbling, you couldn’t decide if you missed the quiet more than you liked the relief of knowing where he’d gone.

“The client called,” you told him, rather than choose. You didn’t look up from your gun. It was already clean.

“And?”

“And she wanted to know where you were.”

“Yeah? What’d you tell her?”

You rearranged your workspace while you spoke. Working over the pistol a fourth time seemed less necessary and more laughable, somehow, than it had a moment before.

“That you were getting supplies.”

Felix snorted.

“Nice. Very original.”

“It was true.”

Felix strolled to your side and dropped his jacket across the bench, and dropped his elbow down on that. _Leaning_ next to where _you_ stood, he seemed miniscule. Looking up at you from under his long lashes, he looked charming. Both impressions were misleading. You had to remind yourself of that.

He watched you until it became confusing.

“Did you want something?” you asked him. Your tone was not generous. His sideways, white-teeth grin melted across his face again.

“Only to ask if you missed me.”

“ _Miss_ ” was not the word you would have used. “ _Worried_ ” was closer; though you told him neither, settling instead with “ _No_.” The grin evaporated into a scowl.

“You should have told me that you would be gone,” you chastised him, before he could object. “Your unexplained absences reflect negatively on our professionalism. If we intend—”

“Jesus,” he groaned. “Forget I asked.”

He slid away from the workbench, leaving his jacket behind him. You turned to follow, and left your gun.

“I wasn’t finished.”

“Nah, I think you were.”

“ _Felix—”_

He mocked you with motion alone, walking backwards toward the mattress on the floor, facing you as he peeled away layers. Set himself free from the high collar of his sweater, pulled at the bandana still tied around his neck. He liked to cover his nose with it while on the motorcycle, a bright spot against the leather he worse. It was orange, vibrant orange, too bright in the dim space you shared. It dragged your eyes down to his neck. And to the fingerprints. Outlines as purple as the circles beneath his eyes.

You had been saying something. Been ready to snarl something, to bite down on the words as they left your mouth so that they’d be bleeding already when they hit him, like a warning. But the thought jammed up in your mouth.

Felix laughed at you.

He threw his head back and yanked the bandana free, offering you the bruises with his tongue between his teeth, like he was courting the idea of biting it off. As if you ever could have been so lucky.

“Your _face,_ ” he cackled at you, lowering his head again. “What’s the matter? Sorry you missed out?”

_Is that why you didn’t call?_

“I’m _sorry_ he didn’t finish the job.”

The retort came fast enough for you to feel proud of yourself, fueled by irritation and discomfort and the constant contamination from the relief that came with his return.

“She,” he corrected, and Felix waved you off.

Like it was nothing.

The dismissal moved up your body from the floor like electricity in reverse.  It boiled up inside you, reeking of resentment, in an instant and swelled to the verge of bursting, burning against the inside of your skin. Your first instinct was to make it stop—at any cost. To reign it in and chain it down.  It was Felix, after all: he dismissed everything outside of himself. But your fingers pressed into the heels of your palms until you wished you hadn’t put the pistol down, carving crescent patterns into your skin. There was an imprint in the blankets still that marked where you’d slept, sideways and anxious, without him. And he waved you off.

You couldn’t be sure what your face looked like: You’d been behind a helmet too long, and had grown complacent in your constant vigil over its behavior. The anger and blankness and fear it sometimes liked to show. But whatever it was that you’d conveyed, Felix threw his hands up In reply, face falling as though you’d wounded him for a single moment before it warped into a scowl. Your hands stayed knotted at your sides—all the answer you could offer his swear-spackled retort. His bitter questions, _what’s with the face?_ and his unasked for editorializing when you didn’t want to respond, conscious of the dangerous sort of words dancing on the tip of your tongue and how he easily they could betray you to him, could demonstrate the concern he didn’t need and shouldn’t have warranted. He shook his head at your silence.

“Jesus, maybe we need to work on getting _you_ laid. Loosen—”

“Shut up.” The words were strong but unreasonable, and you knew it. “We still have work to do.”

Felix snorted. You needed to move. You stepped past him as he studied the array of weapons along the walls to either side of you.

“Are you sure? Because it kind of looks like you’ve been, oh, I don’t know, holed up in here for twenty-four fucking hours cleaning everything we own. And rearranging it. And pre-packing it. Did you do one worthwhile thing while you had the entire fucking place to yourself?”

He wasn’t wrong. You had indeed already arranged the wall you’d just approached. The only missing piece was the pistol, still on the bench. You turned back, again, to retrieve it, moving without a word.

“That’s what I thought. Seriously, Locus: you gotta learn to live a little.”

Felix’s hand smacked into your back pocket as you passed him.

It was hardly the first time he’d done such a thing. Felix liked to invade you, to sneak into your space without warning and catch your confusion like a cat chasing down some frazzled, blinded insect on its way to the light. Sometimes he stayed, slow touches meant to suggest something. Less frequent, but more affecting, were the touches meant to pull you back from wherever it was you’d drifted in the cavernous labyrinth of you mind. You’d always made a point of downplaying your reaction to all of these gestures, in any case: sense and dignity demanded it.

But the pillows. But his absence. But the way you’d woken, paralyzed and sweating with the weight of a world on your chest unable to do anything but blink uncalibrated eyes, as you hadn’t done in months—

Your fist collided with Felix’s gut so forcefully that he buckled at the waist and stumbled backward by a step, tripping over the mattress. He fell into it, flat on his back, and there was a moment of flabbergasted, winded silence, of a wide-eyed look on his face, before he lunged. Without so much as sitting up, he wriggled down the mattress and kicked your ankle with all the strength his tiredness allowed. You were expecting that much. It was when he took your step back as an opening to your other leg, to the knee he hooked his foot behind, that he took you by surprise. The strike sent you sprawling across the mattress beside him.

He was on you in an instant, swinging a leg over you before you’d even finished rolling over, pinning you on your back with his fist lined up for a sloppy, affront-fueled punch. You drove your knuckles into your ribs, and he missed your nose, meeting your cheek instead. It was the kind of hit that would leave a bruise: you could feel the way the impact radiated through the bone beneath your eye. You hit his other side, and heard something pop. Felix swore.

With your feet pressed into the floor, you were able to roll the both of you: he wasn’t paying attention, distracted by his now unhappy rib, and you came down hard on top of him, hemmed in by his legs, his knees up against your elbows as he pinched you between his thighs, seeking a foothold. You pinned his hands above his head. Felix bit your arm with the intent of drawing blood.

But he was smaller than you. Just enough so that you were able to take both his wrists in one hand, pull your flesh free of his teeth, and yank his head back by his hair with the other. He’d been letting it grow out along the top, just long enough to knot your fingers in, if not quite so long as yours, and it made him easy to hold. His mouth fell open as you pulled. Lips, plump and full and tempting and still swollen from the night before, peeled back from perfect teeth. You stared down at him, seething, with your eyes locked on his mouth for a long time before sitting back again. Before releasing him. Felix glowered at you from the mattress.

“You fucking _suck_ ,” he huffed. You said nothing. You felt better for having hit him and, perhaps, for having put him back in your bed. It looked smaller, safer, with him in it.

That was the last thing he said to you before he sat up enough to reach for the front of your sweater, grab you by it, yank you forward, and crash your mouths together.

It was hardly the first time he’d done such a thing.

It was, however, the first time he’d come home from someone else, and still demanded you. And demand he did. As he pulled at your belt and tore it open, and as you worked his undershirt over his head, you wondered what that meant.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Before a Payout of Millions

The other mercenary’s name was Ivan, and he was prettier even than Felix: Slanted ice colored eyes. A porcelain face. Dark hair. Soft, large lips and long-fingered hands. You tried not to notice him, because he was a partner and business arrangement, and you saw him in snippets anyway. Distracting, startling observations that made you want to stare and which you decided to overlook, and to disguise. Felix made no such effort.

You knew, well before it happened, what Felix wanted to do. You were in no positon to ask him not to. Only to watch while the days rolled by and the three of you waited in insufferable silence for any indication that your target was on the move as you’d been expecting him to be; for him to give you a reason to leave the basement you’d bunkered down in and _act,_ preferably before the waiting drove Felix truly insane. Or, more likely still, rendered him so obnoxious that you would finally, after so many years, lose the battle against the urge to kill him. Him, or the chattering partner he was so intent on sharing himself with.

You had your camo engaged when you found them, and a pistol in your hand, but you hadn’t needed it. The cacophony that lead you to them was only that of Ivan’s armor clattering to the floor: He’d had it set out in pieces on the table last you’d seen him, but laying Felix out like a meal evidentially required that he move it.

You froze, unseen, in the doorway.

Felix, with his bodysuit yanked down to his thighs, should not have taken you off guard. You’d seen him exposed in every way you could imagine already, knew what he looked like on his back with his clothes off and someone else’s hand in their place. Usually _your_ hands. You knew what he looked like arching and writhing and clammy with sweat, and you knew the dangerous light in his dark eyes when he was hungry. Knew the way he was looking at Ivan, like he wanted to devour the man and leave him to die, which you knew he could. He wouldn’t have to lift so much as a finger to do it, either. Felix could leave him hollow and spent and exhausted half to death, if that was what he wanted, with nothing but a moan. He could demand it without saying a word. But that knowledge was not what held you. What riveted you. _That_ honor went to a different look. To a lidded look Felix slid in your direction as if he’d known that you had come to him, a look from under his long lashes and out of the corner of his eye meant to announce your arrival as he arched off the table, ground his hips up into his partner’s, as he breathed a sound somewhere between a scream and a groan that made the other shudder and Felix’s eyes roll closed.

He dropped his head, rolled his cheek into the table, and bit into his lip. All of it bravado. All of it excessive. The man standing at the table’s edge, the man whose hips Felix’s legs were slung around, whose tongue was working on his earlobe, was touching him all wrong for him to be so loud, so soon. You knew that. That his grip should be meaner. That Felix was ticklish around his ribs, and liked to be held lower, or not at all. To be forced down, or to force you. He wanted to be worshipped, to be punished. To be undone, or to be brutalized. To be served, or be abused. He liked to pretend there were forces in the world that could make a victim of him, and laugh when he came away satisfied while you collapsed, exhausted by controlling him, and longing to help him lick his wounds. _Balance_ bored him. What excited him were extremes, and no part of what you were seeing could warrant his response, all of it too mundane. The kind of foreplay you engaged him in only when one or both of you were acting out of habit, reacting to proximity with no vested interest in the act—a state that never lasted long before you were tearing each other apart.

You were still standing there, disguised and bewildered, when he opened his eyes and looked right at you, bit into his lip, and smiled. His best, crooked grin, pinned down and made subtle by the pressure of his teeth. The brightness of his bones. And then he threw his head back and did it again, a groan twisted into a snarl.

His partner swore. Mouthed down the front of his body. _That_ was a perspective you’d never had before: the way Felix’s skin _looked_ , gathered between teeth. The way he flexed and tensed when the pressure was right, a tightening of everywhere but his neck, his head cast back, painting the table red with his hair. The strip in the middle that he allowed to grow out was longer than he’d had it in all the time you’d known him, and lately he’d been dying it some vibrant, bloody shade, all red and rust like some trickster god not your own. You’d never seen all the ways it could fall. Not in profile. You’d never seen the shape it made, the way it continued the arch of his neck, spilled out across the tabletop, giving the whole pose some artistic attribute you didn’t know the name for. You’d seen him exposed. Knew what to look for. But you didn’t know this. You didn’t know what to make of it, only that you couldn’t move. Except to step closer. To study the flash of his teeth and the pale line they drew across his lips as they dammed the blood supply. To inspect the lines that appeared at the corners of his eyes as he blinked so hard  you worried for a moment that he’d strain them. You thought he looked divine, all reaction and impulse and tension, as his partner pressed up against him with a hand hidden between his legs.

But what truly captured you, of all his details, was his breathing. The latticework of muscle across his ribs, and the way they stood out when he inhaled, the stuttering patterns they drew for you like an overture to whatever sound he’d next release. You could count the bones as he inhaled, as he whined. Count the divots between them. You made a map of them in your head so that you would know, when next it was your turn to touch him, where to lay your fingers to press into the muscle between them and make him squirm. You marveled at the handholds breathing could make for you. The way his abdomen sucked up beneath his ribcage, turning concave as he tensed, before he snarled and gasped and his stomach had to take over breathing, heaving along with his diaphragm. Felix moaned and hollered, voice keening and high and sharp; crumbling away into gravel and groans, all of it for you, and all you could see of any of it was the way it moved his ribcage.

 His ribs and his waist. That was what you noticed as Ivan flipped him over, pressed him up against the table. He was the wrong height for it, caught on its edge in a way that broke his act, earned his partner a glare in the midst of his swearing and gasping; an anger incongruent with the adoration pouring from his palms as he ran them across every sweat-sheened inch of his own body, begging you to follow them. Which you did, enraptured.

Ultimately, they both ended up on top of the table. And you discovered then there was something mesmerizing, too, about the act of Felix positioning himself on a body so unlike yours, skin so pink and pale and devoid of warmth. But he moved the same way on it, gritted his teeth around his indulgent whining and breathed deep as he rocked his pelvis into place atop his partner. He settled with his back to him, kneeling, straddling the other’s knees. Ivan sat on his feet with legs bent beneath him. He sucked patterns of bruises into Felix’s shoulders as he moved, hands pinned at his hips. Where he liked them.  The next sound he breathed, you imagined, was genuine.

It was the first moment in all of this when your stomach reared up in hot-cold envy. When you wanted to yank Felix away and take him for your own. Spin him around and press him against the wall and fuck him right there with his back pinned to it and his knees up around your waist.

Instead, you moved to the end of the table. Watched him face on.

They started slowly. Felix resumed his bravado, tracking the shimmer of you through the room, fixing his eyes on where you stood, throwing his head back, arching his spine, rolling his hips so that his partner all but seized. You liked the look of it. Of shifting skin over the wings of his pelvis and everything they framed. You very rarely saw him all at once, from his face to his chest to the spread of his legs and the strength of the tendons standing out in his opened thighs—you were always preoccupied with the immediate pieces of him. The taste of his tongue. The rough patch on his neck where his armor used to chafe in BASIC, and how his skin felt on your lips. The parts of him you were aiming to touch were the ones that you usually saw: _pieces._ Fragments of the whole of him. You realized, now, that you’d been missing so much of the motion. For all his writhing beneath you, his preening atop you, there were things you hadn’t seen that had nothing to do with your damaged eyes, and they were each and every one of them exquisite. You traced lines of flexion and tension with your eyes, new shadows and swells and folds, the silhouettes of his bones and the scars that transected them, coiling like serpents to the rhythm of his rise and fall and back and forth. The endless rocking of slow fucking that made his partner moan.

You knew Felix could get more from it. That he could roll forward, put a palm down into the table and push off it, drive himself down harder, at a sharper angle, but he didn’t.

He wanted you to see him.

You knew that was true, though he no longer smiled to show you. He’d lost that fine control that allowed him to measure his ever-mobile mouth. It was slack and gasping, loud as ever but more earnest. More genuine. Which made you less jealous, now, than it made you hungry. Your hands itched at your side to trace a line from his throat to far below his navel, following the midline of his body in all its lovely scar-transected loveliness. You _could_ have put him to the wall and fucked him in that moment, but you also could have touched him. For hours. For days. Could have redrawn by hand the intricate, dark patterns of the tattoos on his arms and legs and back.

You could see those, when he did finally double over. Could see the rise of his spine and the jutting of his shoulder blades and the frame of black across them, an all but solid wall of it with a negative space, a flesh tone V that followed his spine, that drew your attention to its center and to the snapping of his vertebrae together as his head came up, eyes closed, a breathless, choked little sound in his throat. His partner yanked him back to upright and pulled him down roughly.

Felix yelped. And there it was again, a glimmer of envy. Of knowing how much harder he could take it and that this was a day when that would be exactly what he’d want; to be all but split in two. Of knowing that if this _other_ could make him whimper, that you could make him scream.

And you would. Later. Some other night when he wasn’t melting into someone else’s pace, someone else’s pale body, when he wasn’t on display for you with lidded eyes, rapidly losing their focus, but still, through everything, fixed on the very core of _you_. Some night when you weren’t lost in his keening as his head lolled, in the geometry of his body, in muscles that didn’t _sit_ on his frame the way they did on you. That _whispered_. Slid and shifted, caught in the edges of his shuddering ribs, his _ribs_ , again, a matrix of movement and depth and shadow, topography of muscle and bone. You found yourself enamored with the perfect hollow symmetry of his skeleton as he started to come apart before you.

You wished you could kiss him somehow, then, with your camo still running, with that porcelain other still inside him. You didn’t know how better to appreciate him—as his every exhale turned raw, as a flush rose in his face—only that you should. Felix, you now perceived, was a masterpiece.  You liked being a connoisseur.

 

***

 

Felix burst to sloppy completion under someone else’s hand and all but collapsed from his lap with a stifled noise like an inhaled shriek, and an instant of glassy eyes regaining focus.  Just long enough to strike the air from your lungs as he looked at you. You bit your cheek to silence your answer. A breath. His name. You were shaking, you realized, weak from your knees all the way to your lungs.

Ivan remained none the wiser.

“Where’d your partner get to?” He asked when it was over. Felix grinned, a cat with the canary skewered in its paws.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s not far.”

“Creeping around, I’m guessing.”

“Yeah. Sounds like Locus.” It cut you that he wasn’t joking. That Felix all but purred the words. But you chose to overlook them, lost in the seconds-old memory of his climactic eyes.

Ivan had no trust for you, besides. You knew that. If he expected a betrayal, which he should have, considering the fact that you both knew you could expect one from him and intended to deal with it accordingly, he expected it to come from your gun. Not Felix’s. Strange, since it was unlikely to be a bullet at all. Felix was much too fond of slitting throats. Piercing them, if he was in a hurry.

In any case, Felix’s words were a blessing: his partner was quick to leave, passing your camo shadow without a second glance. _Amateur_.

Felix watched you as he waited for him to go away. Waited for you to confess what you’d just done, what it was dawning on you that you had done—

_With his permission . . ._

You deactivated your camo as Ivan disappeared down the hall. Felix studied the painted surface of your helmet with his lip ring between his teeth. Released it again with another Cheshire smile.

“Shit, Locs,” he hummed, sliding off the table, landing with a weakness in his legs that you could see, “I always knew you were a creep, but really: _voyeurism?_ ”

He stopped talking long enough for _you_ to start to crumble, breaking under his gaze in mortified silence— _I_ _thought—_ until his smile freed his teeth. He caught his piercing between them again, for a moment, weighing the blankness of your helmet in a way that told you that he was somehow still _seeing_ you, before speaking again.

“I’m impressed.”

He reclined against the table. Pressed his palms into it with his fingers hanging languidly over its edge, let it dig into the small of his back where you’d have so liked to have put your hand. He crossed his ankles, one behind the other with one leg slack. Like he was making you an offering of the inside of his thigh as he stretched up and back and dropped his weight into his elbows.

But he wasn’t the offering at all.

He was the altar.

Felix stretched against the table so ready to be worshipped, so willing to receive you, and you always treated your equipment so _well_ but you were all helplessness in the presence of him standing before you like a god and your helmet clattered to the floor as you rushed forward to pay him what was owed.

You pulled his head back by his copper hair, threw an arch into his spine that your hand fit into nicely. You’d meant to kiss him. You sank into his neck instead. Caught him on your teeth and _pressed_ until he flinched and then gentled, then _pulled,_ and _sucked,_ let his skin slide free of your incisors millimeters at a time. You made him a collar of bite-marks over the course minutes; meticulous and dedicated, with your hands racing over all the shapes of him that your spectatorship had just discovered. The fold of skin where his shoulder blades pinched, the delicacy of his collarbone and the hollow space above it. The contradictory breadth of his solid shoulders; the musculature of a chest that could fill your hands, every inch of it armor-hard for all its smooth curvature, the inconspicuous strength of it so different, so much more beautiful, than yours.

You counted his ribs with your fingertips and measured his breathing by the way his weak inhaling filled your palms.

“Gloves,” he hissed at you. You tore them off, and kissed his throat while you threw them aside. Tasted the rumble as he spoke, the way his neck tensed when he smirked. “A little excited, are we?”

 _No,_ you were ecstatic. You were throbbing _._ You ground yourself against his leg with your bare hands racing down his hips. He laughed, and jerked his knee, drove it up between your legs so that a short, sharp groan escaped you, as undignified as he could have liked. But you didn’t care, you couldn’t care, you were far too busy consuming him, trying to capture the flavor of everything you’d just seen. Kissing from his throat to his navel to his hips, dragging your lips between each wing of his pelvis and tracing a path down the inside of his thigh as you sank to the ground. To your knees. To a proper position to worship him from, in any manner that he pleased.


	3. On a Planet Called Chorus

You hadn’t expected him to wait.

In the months upon months you spent apart—while Felix laid the groundwork for a mission that sat heavy in your stomach and heavier in your bank account, that promised you the seduction of war and combat and blood—you expected him to wander. He had needs he reveled in filling. You’d never asked him to deny them. And it was hard for you, when you found him doubled over the control console with some pirate—one of _your pirates_ —inside him, to understand why your ribcage was splitting open and your entrails, your heart, were tearing through your muscles on their way to the floor, and how it was that he was stepping on them when Felix most certainly had not moved, and you most certainly were not bleeding or otherwise injured in any capacity that you could see. You couldn’t be injured: you were safe inside your armor. But nevertheless, you _hurt_.

You had never asked nor expected him to wait. But this was not a matter of waiting.

You had been back, now, for six months. And prior to the stage of the mission that demanded you separate in the first place, he hadn’t strayed in two years—

Perhaps he hadn’t had the chance.

Control, once they had acquired you, began assessing you, had offered you no rest. Had left you so little time for separation, or outside partnerships. You’d come so very close—kiss of his steel on your throat, your gun nuzzled under his pretty ribs before you’d changed your mind and knocked him out instead, left him concussed and useless for weeks— _so_ very close to killing each other, trapped in such inflexible, close quarters.

But you’d also kissed him raw, until your lips bruised in silhouettes of his piercing, once a day, once a night, every day and every night; you had reached for each other, fucked him senseless, exerted yourself in his name until your hips your thighs your forearms your neck were covered in the shadows of his fingers, at every available opportunity during that period in which you were captive to Control. And despite all the times he’d tried to hurt you, Felix had stopped claiming he wanted anything else. He’d stopped looking for it, almost entirely, even when the occasion presented itself. Even during the lapses when the frenzy between the two of you faded; when there was work to do that wasn’t made up of bartering and waiting, that left you tired, that left you satisfied even as the violence of it set Felix aflame. Even when all you did in bed together was sleep, and you were too constantly exhausted to remember, upon waking, if after all these years you still had nightmares; even then, for all his snappishness, for all the ways he tortured you for making him wait, for all the nights when he dragged energy from you that you simply didn’t have, he had stayed. Never mind his fury, he had been content to berate you for the boredom you imposed on him—or your delusions of mission, of responsibility, for your careful delineation between play and work—and then, afterwards, to kiss you, and be done. To ask nothing more. As Control’s missions grew more demanding, more strenuous, more bewildering and uncertain and gray, as much as Felix liked to dismiss you, to talk over you, _he hadn’t strayed._ So you didn’t expect for him to wait, while you were gone. But you hadn’t expected him to wander when you returned, either.

Yet there he was.

There he was, and you tripped into the sight of it and must have slipped, somehow, because—though you couldn’t fathom why or how—the sight wounded you. Left you exsanguinating, albeit without a drop of blood.

There console was set against the opposite wall, and you walked in to find Felix _perched_ on it, straddling its curved corner with his knees pinched against it to hold him in place, with his palms pressed flat against the display below him while his partner, standing, fucked him from behind.  You found him with an arch in his spine that suggested it was on the verge of breaking—that was intoxicating just to look at. An elegant, delicious curve that made his waist look small and everything below it all the more voluptuous. That lined up all the right parts of him with his subordinate-turned-partner: Felix was flushed from chest to neck already, all the way into his shoulders, turning skin already sallow from months underground and in armor to an angry maroon-tinged pink. He was neither so dark as you nor so light as his partner, but whatever pale quality he had was souring with every day he spent on this planet, and it made that ruddiness flaring up to his ears so much more obvious to you as he cursed and caterwauled and threw his head back, flashing his reddening neck and glassy eyes.  As he pushed himself up and off the console, sharpening that agonizing arch. Lifted his entire body seemingly by his upper lip as he peeled it up and away from his teeth across a cry so violent there was no sound to at all. Just silence, silence, and then:

 _“Jesus, yeah. Like that.”_ And a stream of profanity. “ _Fuck me, fuck me,”_ and “ _yes”_ directed at someone else while you stood, fully visible in the doorway, watching him choking on his words, watching the way the shape of him changed every time his black-clad partner pushed into him, smacking their flesh together. All lewd sound and divine imagery that made your stomach turn until bile rise in your throat. It wouldn’t have tasted good, if you were kissing him.

But you wanted to anyway. To beat him until he was close to death, and kiss him until he strangled.

Felix, still unaware of you, of your agony, of your anger, arched back into his partner’s hands, let gloved fingers close around the front of his neck, tearing his head back until he gagged and swore and gargled, a gross cacophony of his voice saying the most gratuitous, hedonistic things. “ _Fucking—”_ and “ _‘lovethat”,_ all run together amidst other nonsense utterances nevertheless inclusive of a word you hadn’t known his vocabulary even allowed, that he had never said to you. All because some stranger had yanked him backwards by his throat to bite his neck below his ear, bent him as far back as he could go, and decided to fuck him slow. It was the end of what your heart could take.

You _bellowed_ his name. His pirate paramour jolted, and retracted so fast that Felix yelped, the man’s fear so palpable you could see it through his helmet. Smell it, even past the salty heavy reek of sex in so small a room.

“Get out,” you seethed at him, through your helmet, through your voice filter, so he knew exactly who you were.

The man all but bolted, a hand over his indecency, without pausing even long enough to close his codpiece. You stepped in as he stepped out, and allowed the door to close behind you.

“Aw, c’mon, Locs,” _shut up,_ not now, “seriously?”

Felix’s knees were slackening against the console.

“Don’t move,” you ordered him. The words came out distorted, damaged by the act of you tearing your helmet off. You didn’t want to. Didn’t want to offer him your face, whatever calamity of feeling still showed in your blinded eyes. But you needed to.

You barreled over to where he was, planted your gloved palm between his shoulders and shoved him down into the console.  Felix grunted. You took the chance to get behind him, to shield yourself with his shifting form, tucked away behind his narrow waist and the spread of his tattooed shoulders, as you pulled free from the codpiece of your armor and worked your body to something almost hard, looking at him as you did. Matching the sharp motion of your Kevlar-rough palm to the shifting of the muscles in his shoulders, trying not to think of the way they pinched as he lifted himself back off the console. As his spine grated into that painful, elegant arch and bile rose again in your throat as the image of it—that you liked so much—bled together with the way it had looked with someone other than you behind him, reflux and something still farther outside of your control coming together to form some massive lump in your esophagus that you could barely breathe around, that made your next exhale squeak up into your nose, that made you choke. Choke and swallow even as you and made yourself ready to service him, just hoping he wouldn’t turn to look at you. To see the face you could feel breaking.

Before he could turn around, you forced your way into him. Nothing about it was kind. Nothing about it was properly prepared, no element of it strategized or premeditated. You just grabbed him by his lovely slender hips and pulled him down as you pushed in and up, drove hard and deep inside him. He was slick enough already—through no action of your own—to gasp and shudder and writhe and wince, but not to shout, or want to hit you. He was warm. Humid with sweat, _warm_.

It was agonizing.

You yanked him back by his throat. As his last partner had, with your hand closed over it. And he groaned, wordless, a shadow of what he’d been spewing when you walked in though the position—intimate and flexible—was the same.

You wrapped your free arm around his waist. Imagined you could feel the outlines of muscle through your armor as he flexed, as he breathed, as you jerked into him and paused. As you rolled out. As you slipped back in. Slow and methodic, delta waves, sinusoid shifts of your hips that made him whine; he fit you better than he had his previous partner. You could tell by how he closed around you, reflexive and reactive. A live wire made of flesh; bundles of it that you struck with pointed, precision motion until his hands slipped on the console and you had to press him against you just to keep him still. Dig your armor into his abdomen and crush him into your chest your groin your navel. And with your fingers driving into his neck, you kissed—sucked—his shoulder. Left brands on him, in the shape of your teeth, that you could be sure would welt, would rise of up tender and obvious and purple like a billboard to indicate that he belonged to someone. That _someone_ was you.

You bit into him, and bit back the lump and the cry in your throat, too, as you did.

Felix, ultimately, did enough crying for both of you. The more he shuddered, the more you moved. And it agonized him. Gratuitous whining turned to desperate keening, yelps and gasps and strangled screaming as you punched through him as fast and hard as your body would allow, a rhythm hurried enough that it brought tears to his eyes, and dragged the red in his neck all the way into his face. That brought his head slamming back into your armored shoulder with a crack and his hands to the arm you held across him, fingers dug into Kevlar until his knuckles went white and you thought his nails might shatter. Felix stopped speaking anything that resembled words. You thought you could hear the shapes of him trying, hear consonants in his slurring and yelping, but individual letters were all he had left, his continuous shouts torn to shreds by the punctuation of your body pounding him apart.

You could make him come like this.

Without an ounce of help from your hand, nor his, you could batter that surrender out of him, and you knew it. Could see it in the way he lolled and jerked and seized and stuttered in your arms ­­. Hear it in the noise of his heels kicking the console as his legs tensed and slackened. As he tried to writhe away from you. From your breakneck pace. So you tried to fuck him harder.

Felix shrieked.

He shrieked, and his body clenched around you, and outside of you. A tensing of every inch of him as his head slammed back and his voice broke open, making you believe, for a moment, that even he could be vulnerable. You ran the hand you had around his throat up to his chin, pinched it between your armored fingers, and wrenched his face around to where you could reach him; like a threat of snapping his neck. And you kissed him.

You kissed him long and hard, unyielding against his reluctance. Against his gasping mouth that wouldn’t—could not—close on yours. You bludgeoned an orgasm out of him with gestures so violent that the individual motions lost definition and the sensation of Felix around your body, hot and tight and slick, blurred into tactile static, and Felix himself spilled, rapturous and agonized, convulsing in your arms as you collapsed to a halt. For a moment you surrendered along with him, your jaw slackened, and you could hear him, un-muffled. He was _screaming._

Screaming your name up into your mouth until you bit down on his lip and he went limp in your arms with a shudder like a sob. You kissed him.

You kissed him you kissed him you _kissed_ him so hard that you thought with perfect certainty that it would be enough to alleviate the knot in your throat; to pass the bitter taste of it to him.

You kissed him while he trembled, and forced his sloppy mouth to receive you even as he fought to breathe.

Kissed him until his hand drifted up to your face, millimeters from touching it, from cupping it, from cradling it, from pulling you farther into him—

Only to fall away.

You tore your mouth free, put your hands to his trembling shoulders, and shoved. Sent him sprawling face down across the console now wet with the mess he’d made. And it took him an eon to recover, reduced to shaking, liquid limbs. By the time he dragged himself, groaning, to upright, your helmet was already on.

You slammed it down over the catastrophe of reaction you could feel swelling behind your eyes; over the rising, bitter lump in your throat that you’d tried to make him taste, over the words it formed when it reached your lips. Silent, broken words, their unvoiced echoes felt almost like _love_ on your tongue.

You hated what that meant.

 


End file.
